As promised, here comes a post about how I have started converting to minimalism and intentionality in my house and life. While the first thing that I tackled was my wardrobe, it’s the one that I’m still most dissatisfied with – I feel like I’m in a really liminal space when it comes to my wardrobe, so my closet reflects that “temporary” feelings (I am still nursing… but probably not for too much longer during the day; I’m going back to work… but not until September; it’s freezing and whythehelldoilivehereagain… but spring is *maybe* coming). So as much as I am FAR happier with my wardrobe right now, I’m not quite ready to do more than post the occasionally glimpse on Instagram.

But my kitchen! It’s still also a work in progress, but I had no idea going into this how much this would change my life. Cooking and baking used to be activities that I really enjoyed, and where I was very experimental and, admittedly, quite messy. Cooking for and feeding my toddler and baby, however, has been far less fun. Actually, I could easily accuse it of being the main source of most of my day-to-day anxiety (tied with the Sisyphean task of laundry for a family of four). I had a pantry that was overflowing with STUFF and a fridge and freezer loaded with food that I couldn’t make meals out of – and that usually ended up getting thrown out. Usually, we would look in our fridge, be unable to put anything together into an actual meal, despite the amount of food we were looking at, and then we would order in (I swear that Skip the Dishes knows us by name at this point). So I was doing groceries (and paying for them in time and money) and then STILL ordering in food. Once in a while, my husband would get overwhelmed by the fridge situation and just throw everything out, and we would start all over again.

Part of the problem going in was that I cooked off the top of my head. I’d decide “tonight I should make risotto! And tiramisu!” and off I’d go to the store to buy the specific ingredients for these recipes. I’d make them, love them, leave my kitchen a total disaster, and fill my pantry and fridge with one-off ingredients that would languish there for several years before I’d be like “um why do I have a dusty bottle of Grand Marnier in the back of my pantry? when did I even buy Grand Marnier? was this a gift? which 90-year old gave us this?” before trying to pawn it off on one of my senior family members, with fingers crossed that it wasn’t them who gave it to me in the first place. Through this, I had acquired everything from a jar of what might once have been truffles, to 4 different kinds of curry powders, to various bottles of alcohol, to bottles of condiments with labels in languages that mean I literally don’t know what’s in them.

But no more, friends! No more!

We live in a fairly small house, and we don’t have a lot of pantry or cabinet space, so what space we have is at a premium. That means that the first step I had to take was to completely clear out my pantry and fridge and start fresh. The challenge, though, is that I’ve DONE that before. I had to rethink it and be more intentional about it. So before I decided to do a big clean out, I decided to change the way that I was thinking about cooking. I have done meal planning before, but in the way where I’d go through cookbooks or websites and pick 5 dinners that looked yummy and then buy all of the things I’d need to make those recipes. I don’t deny the appeal here – I am not a food utilitarian. I love food. No, you’re underestimating it. I LOVE food. I have literally planned trips around food. I have decided on which friendships to cultivate based on food. I have, in a concrete sense, decided that eating delicious food is more important to me than losing weight (I’m serious. I’m a size 8 who was formerly a size 2… but I had to struggle to stay at a 2/4 by really restricting what I ate and by making myself do exercise in a way that I don’t enjoy. Now, I am very happy and consistent at my size 8, because I let myself have pain au chocolat with my morning espresso and a chunk of camembert whenever I feel like I need it).

My new approach worked like this: before I emptied out and reorganized my pantry, I needed to figure out what actually NEEDED to be in my pantry. What items do we use again and again? What items do we keep that we don’t use? THEN, I figured out how to organize those items that we really use, and I went about it slowly and deliberately, making space for those items, so that I can easily see them (and therefore am more likely to use them) and so that we know when we are out. It’s not written in stone, and it’s still a work in progress, but certainly this has allowed me to streamline and simplify both my groceries and my cooking.

Secondly, I re-thought my meal planning. I decided on two things: 1. I HAD to have a plan. No more staring at the fridge and figuring out what the heck to cook. and 2. those meals had to have some consistency to them, so that I can re-use the same ingredients and don’t have to spend as much time thinking through things week-by-week and day-by-day. But, let me stress, I cannot do the same meal every night. And I can’t abide by the super plain, boring food that my husband and toddler seem to like. So it had to be exciting (to me), consistent, and easy (like 30 minutes top to bottom). Sadly, there are more conditions that I have to honour, like that my daughter is, y’know, 2, and while I believe that she should eat what we eat because I am not going to add “short order cook” to my already packed job description, I need to take her palate into consideration. I sometimes give her palate more credit than it deserves, and I have to learn from those experiences going forward.

From there, it took a couple of months of trial and error. Some experiments were crazy successful, like having my daughter help me make dinner whenever it was possible, and help serve it wherever it wasn’t possible for her to help cook. Some experiments were significantly less successful, like my curried salmon stirfry, which we thought was delicious and which my daughter thought was worse than starvation. After the trial period (let’s be honest, my life will always be in the trial period), I was able to sort out that my typical week looks something like this:

Monday: vegetarian option (meatless monday!)

Tuesday: tacos

Wednesday: salmon or chicken

Thursday: chicken or salmon

Friday: Pizza (we go to nonna’s house on Fridays for her homemade pizza and have been doing this for a decade- bless her heart for hosting six children and their 5 grandchildren every week)

Saturday: pasta

Sunday: Wild Card (i.e. leftovers, sandwiches, or order in)

All of these meals HAVE to have a protein, a carb/starch, and veggies. My daughter (luckily) does not shy away from any particular category, though she obviously has likes and dislikes within each one. From within this framework, it’s actually really easy. I like to try out a fun recipe at least once a week, but try to pick something that doesn’t require me getting a bunch of random ingredients. We really like Italian and Asian flavours in particular, so I usually stick with those palates, with the occasional branch-out to French or Indian/Thai. We also don’t eat a ton of red meat, as you can see.

Once I had this laid out, the rest came about a lot easier. My grocery list is already 80% done before I even start: I know I need chicken, salmon, whatever meat I’m using for my tacos, and lean ground something for my pasta. I always get a bunch of whatever seasonal vegetables I know I can get my daughter to eat (right now it’s a LOT of cauliflower, beets, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips etc. because it’s winter, but in the summer, it’s more greenery and asparagus). I need rice and potatoes (usually baby potatoes or red so I can keep the skin on and boil them quickly if I need to). I also ALWAYS have garlic, onions, ginger, coconut milk, and the ingredients for tomato sauce. I know a handful of solid recipes that I know my kids and husband will eat, and then I mix it up a 1-2 times per week so that I don’t get bored. Any time I make something adventurous, it’s with the idea in my head that it MIGHT get added to the rotation, if it proves to be simple, delicious and not too expensive to add to the consistent grocery list.

After I had nailed this down and done a few weeks of work with it, I realized that I could pretty effectively organize my pantry. I bought wood crates from Ikea, labelled them with my principal ingredients, and suddenly my pantry looks all fancy. Now, I have saved even more time because I don’t have to really think about my grocery list and (thank you, sweet sweet progress) I use grocery delivery or pickup services. So on Sundays, I just spend 10 minutes putting it all on my online grocery bill and it shows up at my house, or I pick it up, the next morning for the week.

So there you have it. In a strangely ironic twist, the less I have in my pantry and fridge, and the more deliberate I am about what’s there, the easier it is for me to cook quick, healthy, and delicious meals. I swear to you that my mealtime stress has been reduced to almost nothing because of this change. Now my mealtime stress is related to my daughter wanting to eat her dinner sitting on the ground in the closed pantry, which she has proclaimed “the Yukon” and my internal voice whispers to me “choose your battles… one day you’ll tell this story at her wedding.”

What do you do to simplify your mealtime routine? Is it as chaotic and stressful for you as it was for me? I’ve sort of gotten used to the fact that things that are hard for me are often easy for other people because I am a walking ball of loosely bottled anxiety.

And, if you’re interested, my favourite cookbooks and blogs for delicious and quick meals are Half Baked Harvest (her blog and her book are just… wow) and Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks. I also follow a few healthy mom food-bloggers on insta. I’ll do a roundup on there for those who are interested!

So today, I’m going to take a minute (or many minutes) to talk about something that has been on my mind an awful lot recently: minimalism. I know that it’s having a moment, but even for my dislike of trends, I feel that it’s an important movement in North America. I specify that because minimalism is only (and can only be) a trend on a continent that is as focused on materialism and consumerism as we are here. In other parts of the world, there isn’t even a word for the way of life that minimalism represents, because it is so fundamental to day-to-day living as to not be worthy of a moniker.

I am not a minimalist. My husband would laugh long and hard at me calling myself one (or, rather, he’d snort in the sort of mild amusement that all of my fanciful claims about myself are greeted with). I am, as the french would say, a “slob.” I love stuff. And things. In fact, stuff and things have, for the vast majority of my nearly 32 years, been my favourite. I shop habitually. I buy with the sort of impulsivity of a toddler. There is literally no resistance between my “I want this” thought and the squeezing of my trigger finger. I know my credit card information by heart, and my Canada Post delivery person by name (shout out to Frank, yo). In addition to my shopping addiction, I am a hoarder. I am a firm believer that “one day” this L-shaped wrapping paper cast-off will be the perfect shape for wrapping something, and nearly everything that I own becomes imbued with some sort of emotion that makes letting it go feel impossible.

But having kids has changed things for me. Or at least, it’s STARTED to change things for me. You don’t realize, when you bring home a baby, how very much STUFF is going to come along with it. And then, when you’ve wrapped your head around how much stuff a baby comes with, you hit the toddler years and remember how naive you had been when you thought a BABY came with a lot of stuff. And, to top it all off, you’re actually HOME to see all of the STUFF all of the time! In our house, my husband is a natural minimalist. His design sense is most kindly described as spartan, and he so regularly throws things out that one time, when my daughter couldn’t find her bath toy, she legitimately said to me “mommy, maybe daddy throwed it out? Should we ask daddy if he put it in the garbage?” (for those wondering, yes. Yes. He throwed it out.)

But what we can’t bring ourselves to throw out finds its way to our undeveloped basement (affectionately referred to around these parts as “Mordor”) where they simply wait, cluttering up our house’s subconscious like Norman Bates’ mommy-issues.

And so, increasingly over the last two years, I have found myself with a growing sense of restless discontent. I did not, at first, associate it with my cluttered existence, and searched around aimlessly for its root source. Was I unhappy in my job? Was it that I was unfit for parenthood? Did I need a new hobby? I settled on the fact that our house is too small and too removed from nature and blamed that entirely for how I was feeling. If, I thought, we only had more square footage, I would be happy. If we lived near the river valley… or walking distance from shops… I’d be happy. I expressed these beliefs to my husband, and we began planning to house hunt. But it was in these conversations that I really started to analyze WHAT was making me unhappy. What was making me want to move? Our stuff. I was trying to escape our STUFF. I was unhappy because I was living in a world centred on the belief that I would be happy WHEN and IF something happened. If you know me at all, you know that I am like an introverted bloodhound – a veritable Sherlock Holmes of my own interior landscape – so once I realized this fact, I started the hunt to find the root issue and suss out a possible solution.

When I looked at why I was unhappy and restless, it had a lot to do with the stuff in my life. My house was too small and not decorated the way I’d like, my closet was full of clothes but I had nothing to wear, I didn’t have enough time and energy for the activities that I love doing, and I always felt stressed about money. As I reflected, I realized that this had a lot to do with my attachment of happiness to things. Like that I couldn’t buy myself skinny, but I could buy myself the magic pair of pants that would make me FEEL skinny. I couldn’t buy myself confidence in my parenting, but I could maybe find the perfect toy for them that would make me FEEL like a good mom. I had a hole inside of me and I could feel it, but I thought that maybe I could fill it with THINGS and it would go away. Sadly, all of those things were only making the hole worse. I didn’t have time to read during the day, because I had mountains of laundry to do. I couldn’t bake, or paint, because our house was a mess – and cleaning takes forever when every conceivable surface is covered in stuff. I wanted to put on clothes and feel good about myself, but I’d stare at a closet full of clothes that were just not QUITE right and end up throwing on the same pair of broken in denim and an old sweater and feel like a slob all day. The stuff I was buying to try to keep myself happy was actually accomplishing the opposite effect: I was more unhappy BECAUSE of my stuff.

I started thinking about my kids. Do I want to raise them this way? So that when they are 32, they look at their lives and think, “I could be happy if only I had x and y?” No. I don’t want that for them. I don’t want them to feel the sort of vapid emptiness that I felt when I looked around my life this past fall. I want for them to know contentment and gratitude. I want them to know peace, and to accept themselves as they ARE, not as they might be, if only they were to _______________.

I was happy as a child. Incandescently so. I was restless, sure, but in the passionately restless way that all children are – before age slows that youthful restlessness of body and spirit into stagnation. My memories of childhood are sepia-toned and exist in a perpetual summer, where I still harboured the belief that, if I swung hard enough, I could swing all the way around the top bar of the swing set. My memories aren’t of toys, or things (with a few very notable exceptions); my memories are of time well-spent and well-wasted. Of times where boredom flourished into imagination, and adventure was always at hand. Where I had no fear of failure, because every try was a success in and of itself.

I want that back. I know, though, that I can’t have it again, in the way that it once was… I’m older now, and life is no longer a sepia-toned summer. But, if I try really hard, maybe I can give my kids those same memories to anchor them and inspire them. Memories that aren’t bought and paid for in cash, that don’t happen in a bigger house, or in a fancier car; but that are bought and paid for in time and focus. In attention to the world as it is now, and in a deliberate savouring of these precious moments we have been given.

I need to find that time, that gratitude and focus, that intentionality. I think it’s here somewhere, buried beneath all my stuff. I am, as of these past few months, clearing things out to make space for those moments to be found and, at times, I have seen those hidden moments glimmering in the newly empty spaces in my house; I feel the tantalizing hints of fullness in my heart that I have been searching for.

I hope to share more about this in future posts – what I have done so far to live with less and to simplify, and what is to come for this aspiring minimalist and (hopefully) reformed mindless consumer. Stay tuned.

So I’ve been away for a while. First, I took some time off for Christmas. Then, I realized I was online too much, so I wanted to sort out my priorities… and then, my depression acted up. I like to think of depression as something like arthritis: it’s always there, but sometimes it “acts up.” In many ways, to me, that’s the most accurate description of depression. I can still get out of bed. I can still interact with people, and laugh, and chase my kids. But it’s harder – almost impossible – on the mornings where my depression is acting up. It can be affected by the weather: I have a much harder time dealing with depression on cold, dark days than on sunny ones (though this is not always the case). In addition to the physical similarities, I also see a commonality in the way that people treat depression and arthritis. If you have arthritis (or any chronic pain condition, like fibromyalgia), you know what I mean when I say this: people don’t want to hear you talk about it. The first time you are with someone and you are having a flare-up, you tell them about your condition and they are sympathetic. But if every time you’re with them, you move slower, or you complain (or even mention it), they eventually get tired of hearing about it… or at least it sure feels that way to you. So you start to pretend that it DOESN’T bother you. You smile through the winces; you get up and participate, even if all you want to do is sit and cry.

That. That is depression. Or at least what it is to me.

I have what is called, in some schools, “high functioning depression” because I can live a “normal” life, even when in the throes of mental illness. I can camouflage. I smile, instead of crying. I play with my kids, and talk to friends, instead of staring at a wall. I work, instead of sleeping. I have learned what I look like when I’m “normal” and I emulate those behaviours as closely as possible. I usually feel like people just don’t want to hear about it (even if that’s simply not true, it’s how I FEEL when I’m there), and that I can’t use it as an excuse for withdrawing from the world, because my friends/coworkers/family deserve better than that, even if it’s what I need for my own well-being.

And this is especially true as a mom.

How do you explain to a 2 year old that you literally can’t talk to her because it is taking every ounce of your energy just to be in clothing? Or that you can’t walk to the playground today because the struggle to put together more than one-word sentences is simply too overwhelming a task? My desperate desire for her not to see me having Rochester’s-first-wife-in-the-attic moments is so strong that I power through. My intense need not to somehow pass this on to her, like some kind of mental flu. It’s like jr high track and field: you HAVE to participate, even if you’d rather cut your own legs off than race the 800 meter today. I get in my lane and run the damn race; it’s just that I’m running the race in knee-deep mud, so every stride takes 10 times the effort that it should. And even when I know it’s not true, it feels like my lane is the only one with this mud in it – like somehow all the other moms got clean lanes. So I’ll show up. I’ll race. I’ll put on my runners, I’ll get in my lane, and I’ll run this damn race like my lane isn’t full of mud.

And the cycle, as vicious as it is, requires that I then recharge from the herculean effort of doing something totally innocuous with copious amounts of sleep. If you’re a mom, you already know the punchline: sleep is not something easy to come by as a parent.

That’s it. I don’t have advice. I don’t think of myself as somehow “better” than other people with depression, just because I can force myself out of bed. Trust me, there are days when I can’t. I understand the crushing weight of it.

So, moms out there with depression – I feel you. A wild, sad, emphatic salute to you in your struggle. For days when you show up, and days when you can’t. Days where you smile and laugh and chase and tickle and days when you stare at a blank wall while your baby naps. For the times you swallow what you want to say and say “I’m fine” and days when you can’t, and you cry when you’re asked if you’re alright. Stay strong.

This is my annual post for Bell Let’s Talk Day. I started trying to be more open about my mental illnesses several years ago, starting with a post on Bell Let’s Talk Day on facebook that marked the first time I ever openly anounced my struggles, and I want to end this one the same way I’ve ended them all: if you are struggling, reach out to someone (if you can) and know that you are NOT alone. If you aren’t struggling, reach out to someone who might be.

So life with a toddler and a baby is, as expected, insane. But the previous level of insanity reached a new level of crazy this weekend when we decided to potty train G.

Backtrack a second. We actually decided to potty train her like, three months ago, but we went about it in the way that I go about everything: half-assed. And you cannot half-ass potty training. You must whole-ass potty training. Ass-and-a-half, even. Prior to Friday, G had peed on the potty ONCE successfully and it was after my mom sat with her on the potty for an hour and a half with stickers. I had gone to Toys R Us around her second birthday and bought a potty for on the toilet, and a portable seat for when we went out. I switched her to pull-ups, and occasionally I’d ask if she needed to go to the potty, but that was it. I was doing basically nothing, but at the same time I was frustrated because it wasn’t working. So I went and bought an elmo stand-alone potty. I had sticker books, special search-and-find books and a renewed determination to… do exactly the same amount of nothing.

Four months pass. I get no sleep. Daycare will only support what I already have in place, but wont potty train her for me (the nerve of them, refusing to parent my child and making me do it), and the after-daycare hours are so crazy that seriously I blinked and those four months were gone. MY plans to have her potty trained before the snow was wiped out by both my own inaction and Edmonton’s early snowfall (which has trapped me in the house like some sort of domestic version of The Revenant).

But wait! Here comes a three day weekend! Didn’t my mother-in-law tell me that it only takes three days to potty train a toddler if you dont let them wear pants?! PERFECT! So when Friday rolls around, we get G from her room and… take her pants away. At first, she was really upset because she loves her pants (they have cats on them. Cats. I’m such a dog person and my kid freaking love cats. I think it’s evidence that she’s already going to be a rebellious teenager) and then, when we slowly tried to take her pull-ups away, things got a bit hairy. See, her pull-ups have “Mickey” (it’s totally Minnie) on them, and it was like we were torturing her by not allowing her to wear them. After a few attempts at distraction, we put a towel on the floor and took out her favourite puzzle, and she thought making “bum marks” on the towel with her penaten-coated rear was hilarious, so we were out of the woods.

Then we hunkered down to wait it out. Everyone has told us that potty-training is the hardest and worst part of parenting, so we were prepared for the worst. We had coffee. We had snacks. We weren’t leaving until she was potty-trained. We set a “tinkle timer” on my phone for 20 minutes. We gave her as much water-diluted apple juice as she could drink (and holy shit can she drink a lot) When the tinkle timer went off, we went to the potty. At first she thought this was a hilarious game, and would hang out on the potty and read her new Richard Scarry word book.

The novelty wore off quickly.

Soon the tinkle timer was a source of mini tantrums, so we turned it off. And it happened! She stood up, looked at me and said “the pee is coming” and we ran to the toilet and it happened! And there was no going back: she didnt have a single accident that first day. We patted ourselves on the back for being such exceptional parents.

Saturday.

I spent the entire day in the bathroom on Saturday. I Swear. She had tasted success (it tasted like watered down apple juice, I assume) and wanted more. Now she got her big girl underwear (it has Paw Patrol characters on it so we sing the theme song constantly – or at least the one line from the theme song that I know) and she wasn’t going to risk getting Skye or Marshall “wet.” We did have our first accident, but it was because she was so excited about her puzzle that she didn’t want to go to the bathroom, so she peed a little while working on it. But she told me right away and we went to the potty and it was all golden.

Sunday was the real test.

On Sunday, we left the house. We went to dance class in the morning – no accidents. We had our first legitimate accident at a restaurant that night when she told me she had to go and I let her leave the bathroom before she had gone to the bathroom (my fault, but seriously Tony’s Pizza was calling me back to the table!)

So where are we at now?

Well, this sounds like we had an incredibly successful weekend and, honestly, I would say that’s true. We bonded a lot, she learned to tell me when she has to go to the bathroom, and it seems like she’s really got this when we are at home.

BUT

BUT

She does not want to use the potty at daycare. It means that she has to stop playing to go, and they are spread too thin to set a 20 minute tinkle timer, or sit with her on the potty for 40 minutes waiting for her to pee, and I get it. But it’s undermining the process for sure.

And she does NOT have it together for naps/bedtime. That will be a big issue going forward, and I have no idea how to approach it. She can’t get out of her room on her own, and we don’t have the kind of monitor in her room where we can hear her all the time – we use a Nest cam, so we can open it on our phones to see her, but it’s not like we would hear her saying she needs to use the potty unless we HAPPENED to be watching when she did. So if anyone has any ideas here, I’d love to hear them (and then probably ignore them for like 4 months before I give in and half-ass them…as I do).

And here is the biggest one: we have noticed that during this process, her attachment has gone through the roof. It’s heartbreaking. Beditme and daycare time have gone through a HUGE regression since Friday. I know we just have to ride it out, but it’s awful in the meantime, and it’s going to get worse because I’m a masochist and I’m going to start sleep-training L right away here… ugh why.

AND (whiney rant coming)

GOD I ALREADY MISS DIAPERS.

I know. I know. Who MISSES diapers?? ME! I DO! Do you know what I hate more than cleaning my toddler’s poopy butt? Sitting on the ground in a public toilet for fourty minutes waiting for her to poop and then STILL HAVING TO WIPE HER POOPY BUTT! She’s GONE MAD WITH POWER! She knows that I have to run with her to the potty if she says she has to go, AND SHE’S ABUSING THE TINY MODICUM OF POWER SHE HAS BEEN GIVEN! This kid should NEVER be allowed to hold a position of authority – it WILL corrupt her!

Next up: sleep training. I know there are a lot of opinions about it out there, but I’m going to talk about my experiences and opinions in my next post. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your experiences with potty-training and what has worked for you!

I haven’t posted in a month. I have a hundred excuses why. Some are more valid than others, but none of them are the full truth.

Excuse 1: I had family come in for a visit. They drove from Ontario to visit with us and, as the designated stay-at-home-for-right-now mom, I was more than happy to escort them about the city, showing off the place I love.

Excuse 2: Holidays. Between thanksgiving and Halloween, a lot has been going on. G had her first movie experience, we have carved multiple pumpkins. We have baked and eaten that baking. I have gained back all of the weight that I had lost… you know what they say: Thanksgiving is the beginning of the end for every weak-willed dieter.

Excuse 3: I am a bridesmaid in a wedding and the bachelorette party was in Canmore last weekend. A LOT of my focus had to go into that.

Excuse 4: L is in a BAD sleep regression. G had them when she was a baby, but not like this. I am getting absolutely no more than 90 minutes of sleep at night and only a few small breaks during the day. I love him to little bits but I may leave him in a box on the side of the road with a “Free Baby” sign pretty soon.

Ok so not 100 excuses, but four. Again, all of them real reasons why I have been lax in my blog posting duties, but none of them cover all of it. The real reason was one that I hadn’t been able to recognize until I was at my book club last Thursday. My book club, which has only had two meetings so far, is made up of women that I’ve never met, all of whom are small business owners or entrepreneurs. They are incredible. Beautiful inside and out, these women work their tails off to live their dream and to make their visions reality. I was overwhelmed, surrounded by them, by how strong and utterly RELENTLESS they are. Our book for October was “Thrive” by Arianna Huffington and while we all agreed that it was sort of “meh” overall, it had a few interesting points that became deep conversations for us. One of the key points was hit on the head by one of the other women: we are constantly told to question our own abilities and value. We have these deep desires and wants in our lives… oftentimes involving dreams we want to pursue. But we stop ourselves. We stop because we think of finances. We think of responsibilities. We think, most of all, “who am I to do this?”

And that line is what struck me. “Who am I to do this?” She was speaking of her own experiences, and yet it was like she was giving voice to the fear that hides in the back of my head: Who am I to think that I am worth hearing? Who am I to think I can speak to this or that? Who am I to think anyone wants to hear what I have to say?

For all of the many concrete reasons I had given myself for putting off posting, this was the one that they hid: my deep insecurity that no one should care what I have to say; that it is arrogant for me to think that what I have to say is worth being heard at all.

I recently read a piece by Joan Didion that talks about self-respect and the struggle to find it. She likened it to a “well-lit back alley” where all of our self-knowledge waits to essentially mug us with the truths behind our masks and self-image and reputation: here lurk the truths you can hide from everyone but yourself. I think I LIVE in that back alley. I am never unaware of my failings, big and small. I still think about the time I called a kid a bad name in grade 4 and that one time I didn’t stand up for my mom when I should have. I’m aware of the frustration I feel when I’m with my daughter – the short-tempered cruelties that shame me deeply. I can’t pretend with myself to be any kind of parenting sage because I know too well the truth of myself, and to write any kind of piece that says otherwise is to be inauthentic.

It’s a funny duality that I have found in motherhood: I jealously remember the times in my life when I was truly seen, now that I am permanently relegated to the background of my children’s lives. I once was the sun, with everything orbiting around my life, but now I am just one of those planets, orbiting G and L while they shine. I guard the precious memories of my life BEFORE when I was Danielle and not just mom. When I had interests and independence. But the irony is that I think my greatest fear is to be truly seen now. To be seen in my inglorious moments, my frustrated ones, my shameful ones. It’s one thing to embrace the messiness of parenthood – there is a deeply funny side to the trivial failings of our day-to-day lives: the spilled milk, the spit up accidents, the blow-outs. There is a black humour to the first time your kid repeats the word “fuck” or accidentally does something inappropriate with total, pure innocence. But it’s a different beast to look at our real failings as parents and as people. Those are moments we do not want to be seen… and they are moments that I feel I have had more of since I became a mom.

And yet, I believe there is value in it. I think that there are those moments where seeing someone else be vulnerable allows us a greater connection to both ourselves and one another. I believe that we are closer when we see each other as human. Especially in a time where social media makes it difficult to separate someone’s PROFILE from her LIFE.

So I’m back. I have to believe that there is a value to what I want to say. Perhaps it will be uncomfortable – for me, for people who read it – but perhaps there is value in that. If I want to raise a daughter who sees value in her own thoughts and voice, I have to find that value in my own.

When I was a kid, I won a purple participation ribbon at track and field day. It was fourth grade – the first time that we had to compete in the events instead of just playing around outside – and I was running the 100 metre. I chose the 100 metre not because I am fast… on the contrary: I chose the 100 metre because I am an awful athlete and it was the one that would be over the quickest so that I could get my tiny ice cream with the popsicle stick spoon. The humiliation of placing second last (God bless you, last placer) was quickly fixed by the pinning of a ribbon and the reception of a delicious ice cream treat.

And track was not the only area of my life where I received head-pats for mediocrity. My parents, with all of the well-meaning enthusiasm of the 90s, cheered me on by telling me that sacred millennial mantra: you can be ANYTHING you want if you put your mind to it! I embraced this foolhardy belief system, but with one important alteration. In my head, I adopted the belief that not only could I do ANYTHING, but I could do EVERYTHING. I was a special little snowflake who would excel (or at least not be the worst) at everything I tried. I blithely marched out into the world to take what was mine: all of it. And, for a time, it worked.

I worked what amounted to full-time through university, maintaining my grades while simultaneously volunteering to puff up my resume. I planned a wedding as a first year teacher (if you’ve been one, you know what the hours are like) while maintaining a decent social life (for me, anyway). I coached, directed the play, worked 14 hour days building resources that totally already existed, and somehow still found time for dates with my husband and lots of shopping. Sure, there were trade offs, and I did none of those things to the best of my abilities, because there were too many things to become really excellent at any of them.

So when I became a mom, I figured it would be the same deal: put my mind to it and I’d be able to do it all. I would be able to be a mom, have a career, maintain my marriage, keep my friends and social life, get the best body of my life and, of course, have a killer closet. If you’re not laughing yet, it’s because you’re not a mom.

With my first, I realized that I was an idiot pretty much right away. There was no way I was doing all of that, but in my head I added a yet. I only couldn’t do it all because I was in a transition period, or because I was physically recovering, or because I was pregnant again and exhausted (I had hyperemesis with my second, so it was a good excuse). Whatever the reason, there was a REASON I couldn’t have it all… YET. As soon as those reasons were resolved, I would be able to get it all going and have everything.

But it never happened.

Today, I sat in the middle of my floor wearing oven mitts and my husband’s flipflops, crying. It was the basement, too, which is undeveloped, so I had dust all over my skirt (yes, skirt). I had decided when I had my second that the excuses were over: it was time to really put my mind to it. I woke up every morning and did my hair and basic makeup. I signed up for workout classes. I went dairy-free and started watching what I ate. I cleaned my house, and then cleaned it again. I signed up for EVERYTHING for my daughter – taking her on weekly trips to everywhere. I met up with friends. I started planning and working on a bachelorette and shower for a wedding I’m in. I started hobbies. I began redecorating my house (more on this later).

And then I found myself sitting on the floor.

After getting ready to go out and meet my mom for lunch, I had tried to take the glass out of a frame for a painting I had made with my husband and daughter when I was being everything on the weekend (note: here is me simultaneously trying to be stylish, social AND good around the house). In the midst of it, the glass broke a little. So I went upstairs to get gloves to pick up the glass, but when I tried to move the frame to find the broken piece, the rest of the glass shattered. So now I’m in flip flops and a skirt, with oven mitts (I couldn’t find my work gloves), surrounded by broken glass in my undeveloped basement. I’m not wearing my glasses, so I can’t REALLY tell where the glass is. So I crouch veeerrrry slowly down and hear the crunching that tells me that I am probably millimetres from slicing the shit out of my feet. With my oven mitts, I “feel around” (note: you cannot feel anything through oven mitts) and find the slicey bits. I try to put them in a garbage bag, but whaddaya know, they slice the bag to shreds. Slowly, slowly, I pick up the glass and pile it on an old ottoman that has been relegated to the “not ready to sell it, but not a part of my decor anymore” pile. Upstairs, Leo wakes up and cries, hungry. Downstairs, the frame I had been trying to use breaks when I try to move it out of the area now that the glass has been picked up. I’m exhausted. I cry.

It’s self-pity crying. It’s pathetic.

But it’s IMPORTANT. I continually forget that my near-zealous devotion to the ideal that I can be anything I want is not the same thing as being EVERYTHING I want. I am NOT a DIY-er (note that at the same time as this glass incident, there was also an oversized hole in the wall of a room upstairs where I had tried to use drywall anchors and hit a stud). I am NOT a social butterfly. God I want to be. And most importantly, I cannot be ALL of the things I want to be all at the same time. I can’t be the well-dressed, DIY expert in a perfectly maintained home who flits from pilates class to wine night with my girlfriends who still has a perfect marriage, kids who get enough attention, and grandparents who are involved in the lives of their grandchildren. I definitely can’t do it all while I’m exhausted from not sleeping longer than 45 minutes at a stretch for the past two and a half months. Every choice I make has to come at the expense of something else. Wine night with girlfriends means another night I’m not spending quality time with my husband after the kids are asleep, a workout means a nap time is disrupted, time with my husband means introducing a bottle, becoming a DIY goddess means being bodysnatched my aliens because let’s be honest, that shit’s just not in my DNA.

We only have so many resources to spend. I have always spread them around too thin, seeking the realization of my fourth grade dreams. I never really let go of the idea that I COULD be a singer if I really wanted to (I’m still waiting to be discovered) and so I hold onto the notion that I CAN be all of the things that I want to be all at the same time, and, if I’m honest, that I can do it all with very little cost to myself. The problem with being EVERYTHING as a parent, is that now there is a real price to being only “okay” at aspects of your life that are important. You don’t give yourself enough time to LEARN or improve, you just accept average (or worse) because you dont have the resources left to get better. You don’t have the ability, or even the desire, to get better… you just want to be at the finish line and get your fucking ice cream already…but there’s no ice cream or purple ribbons for parenting. There are very real people who need you to not take the shortcuts where they’re concerned. They need better than (second) last place.

So no more DIY for now. No more stretching myself thin. Time to get back to what matters the most: my family and my well-being.

I had started on a post about good/bad baby products for today, but honestly I can’t get through it. I am having a “down” day, which is code for a day where my depression and anxiety is causing me to struggle with personing. I have had struggles with depression and anxiety since I was pretty young, and some periods have been worse than others. Being a mom has, unfortunately, triggered a lot of my mental health issues because of the constant feeling of not-enoughness that pervades a mom’s day to day living.

Yesterday was a bad day. I looked around my kitchen and couldn’t make myself do dishes. Which, of course, triggered feelings of failure because I was being “lazy” and couldn’t do what I feel is an expected bare minimum for me when I’m home all day. I was a miserable ball of grump when I went to a pilates class and found out that it wasn’t pilates but *GASP* *HORROR* a barre class instead (“I didn’t come here expecting to do SQUATS for heaven’s sake” she says to the clearly offended instructor) making me feel like a huge bitch. I went to school to help with auditions where I knew I would be letting everyone down because I wouldn’t be able to help with the show the way I would have before I had kids. I was late getting home and didn’t have dinner ready. I was short tempered with my daughter. I was irritated with my son (Good Lord don’t you eventually reach a point of exhaustion where you just pass out? When the hell does that happen for a newborn?? He could seriously keep national secrets safe in the face of sleep-deprivation torture). I ate poorly because I had no energy and then hated myself for undermining my hard work to eat well for my health and milk supply. I grumped at my poor mother on the phone. I felt like a failure across the board. The voice in my head repeated it to me: all the ways that I had failed all of the people around me. I wasn’t giving enough to my kids, to my husband, to my family, to my job… and yet I felt like I had nothing else I could give… so clearly, I’m just not ENOUGH.

Yeah. It was a bad day. Depression, added in to the relentless erosion of parenthood, can be a beast.

In particular, it was my daughter I felt that I was failing. I looked at her and someone else had put her hair in a ponytail (some well-meaning daycare working) and she had on dirty clothes with her runny nose and her perpetual daycare cold and I was crushed by the feeling that I was letting her down as a parent. And even with that knowledge, I couldn’t stay patient with her when we were eating dinner (I spent seven damn minutes grilling this steak and you “no want meat”?!).

I was in tears by bedtime. Not because of her – she is amazing – but because of me. She’s TWO, dammit. She wants to play hide n seek instead of putting on her pajamas; she doesn’t understand that I can’t help open the blue playdough when both of my hands are full, and she can’t help it that she can repeat the same sentence – “mommy help with boo paydough? mommy help with boo paydough? – a thousand times without realizing that she’s going to break me. I came in to her room for the bedtime routine secure in my knowledge that I am a BAD MOM.

And then

We are lying in her bed, reading her story (“David’s Father” by Robert Munsch right now) and I’m lying next to her, with my head propped up on my hand while daddy reads and she yells out the parts that she knows. All of a sudden, in one of those purely spontaneous moments that only kids seem capable of, she reaches a chubby little arm out and puts it around my neck. She pulls my head down onto her tiny chest – I can hear her heartbeat like a butterfly through her fleece puppy pajamas – and she puts her sweet little lips on top of my head and says, entirely unprovoked, “I happy mommy.”

She’s happy.

She’s HAPPY.

I am not enough. I never will be. I will never be enough to deserve the love that my daughter has for me… I will never deserve the way she looks to me when she needs reassurance… the trust she feels looking at me. That’s a form of grace, you guys. Undeserved, needed, precious beyond belief. It makes my not-enoughness enough.